Jack Shafer

In the old days, issuing one required a stamp, an envelope and a trip to a post box. You had to wear gloves to prevent embossing the page with incriminating fingerprints. Spell it out longhand? Good God no! Given a few leads, the boys in police forensics could compare it to other samples of your handwriting. Use a typewriter? Typewriters leave tell-tale signatures on the page by which the machine and potentially the owner can be identified. Cut and paste from newspaper headlines, ransom-note style? A very time- consuming project just to put the fear of death into somebody. Use a telephone? C’mon, phone records can be traced.

You know that annoying guy in the office who steps on all of your punch lines? Who deflates with a concise quip the shaggy dog stories you’re trying to tell? Well, that buttinski has taken his act to Twitter where, under the username SavedYouAClick, he’s razoring the guts out of the often misleading and exploitative click-bait tweets posted by Huffington Post, Vice, Mashable, Cosmopolitan, Business Insider, TMZ, Drudge Report, and others designed to drive you to their stories.

The Army has no immediate plans to punish Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for leaving his post in Afghanistan, Secretary of the Army John McHugh said in a statement on Tuesday, putting Bergdahl’s medical and psychological needs first. Bergdahl, a Taliban prisoner for the past five years, was swapped over the weekend for five Talban heavyweights imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

I’ve got an Amazon habit. Like many of my other habits — coffee drinking, newspaper reading, excessive profanity — it’s one that I’ve cultivated and refined over the years, ever since I made my first purchase on June 24, 1996, for a new copy of Dan Wakefield’s New York in the Fifties.

For a drug that has never ever gone away, heroin sure has a talent for coming back every couple of years. On Tuesday, the New York Times advanced the belief that a “flood of heroin” is flowing into New York City in a Page One story titled “New York Is a Hub in a Surging Heroin Trade.”

It’s not that journalists have thin skins — it’s that they have no skins.

This adage gets trotted out once a month or more in better newsrooms to provide context for the overreaction of a reporter or editor who has found himself on the receiving end of criticism for something they’ve published. This week, some journalists who have been critical of Glenn Greenwald are seeking skin grafts for their skin grafts after reading his denunciation of them in the final chapter of his new book about the Snowden files, No Place to Hide.

Whenever editors want to impose their will on a newsroom — be they editors at newspapers, magazines, news wires, websites, or TV programs — they dictate a memo for distribution to their journalists noting that stories have gotten too long and instructing everybody to write shorter. It’s a frequent request, as editors come to believe that their reporters aren’t listening to them or are openly defying their requests to file more succinct copy. In recent days, top editors at my outlet, Reuters, sent such a memo, asking writers in the Americas to diet their copy down to between 300 and 500 words. So did a top editor at the Associated Press, who set similar goals for his reporters and editors. Inspired by these bold moves, I’m sure that editors all over America have typed up their own shorter-is-better memos and are pressing send right now. (The Reuters memo says the call for short copy is nothing new — it’s in the Reuters Handbook. The AP says it’s responding to requests of its members, who don’t have time to edit copy down.)

Cass R. Sunstein emptied his digestive system of a steaming wad of press rancor Wednesday in his Bloomberg View column titled “Why Officials Don’t Tell the Media Everything.” Sunstein — a legal scholar who served as the Obama administration’s regulatory czar for three years and more recently sat on the panel that reviewed U.S. surveillance programs — phrases in his usual genial but condescending fashion his objections to journalism as practiced in Washington.